Note to editors and news directors: Photos are available to accompany this release at at http://news.humboldt.edu as is a separately posted sidebar that briefly describes the natural history of jaguars.
When Emil McCain saw the black spots across the middle of his photographs,
he was thrilled – because they blanketed the coats of elusive jaguars.
The four photographs were literally shots in the dark, taken in the middle
of the night by remote cameras stationed in the Arizona desert near the Mexican
border. Their shutters and flashes were triggered by heat-in-motion sensors,
similar to an automatic light switch. McCain, meanwhile, was back at Humboldt
State University, where he is a wildlife graduate student.
McCain had set the cameras up earlier this year ostensibly to support his
master’s thesis on mountain lion activity in the area. But his focus was
really on jaguars, a much larger, more elusive and, in the Southwest, almost
exclusively nocturnal cat. For more about jaguars, see this sidebar. Particularly, he sought evidence they may be returning to the region, an area from which they had long been extirpated.
The four photos each show a jaguar heading away from the lens. From a close
comparison of the patterns of spots, two significant pictures emerge, McCain
said. One of his photos captured the same jaguar
that had been photographed by Arizona houndsman Jack Childs in 2001, indicating
that the cat is likely a resident of the area rather than just passing through
from Northern Mexico as had been thought. The other photos indicate at least one other jaguar, and possibly two, in the area. This could indicate a population, albeit a small one, resides there.
 According to McCain’s major advisor, HSU wildlife Professor T. Luke George, “Those two points are really huge.”
Prior to McCain’s images, only four photos of jaguars in the wild, all shot
in the last 10 years, had been taken in the United States since the large
predators were extirpated from the country in the mid-1900s, George said.
In 1996, two were spotted by eyewitnesses, one by a hunter in New Mexico
and one by Childs in Arizona, according to Arizona’s Game and Fish Department.
Bill Van Pelt, head of AGF's Nongame Program, said, “The new pictures mark a milestone.”
While McCain's cameras, chained to trees and safely housed in waterproof
boxes, snapped their shots of spots, he was taking classes a thousand miles
away. But when he saw the images he knew immediately they were jaguars. Indeed,
while in the field in June, he spotted definitive tracks. He had also seen
them first-hand in the jungles of Costa Rica and in rugged mountains of Mexico.
Growing up as an only child on a Colorado ranch that bordered wilderness,
McCain spent his childhood hiking and tracking, and he figures he saw his
first mountain lion when he was 10 years old. His academic advisor George
calls him “one of those people born 150 years too late.”
“Emil
has skills at tracking that few people in the world have,” said George. “It’s
an intuition that helped him get those photos; they’re not a fluke. He pushed
the (proverbial) boundary to get into inaccessible areas and had a good sense
of how jaguars travel.”
The main reason McCain’s master’s thesis focuses on mountain lions is because,
as George put it, “You’re not going to get enough data on jaguars in that
area.” But, with film and batteries provided by Arizona Game and Fish, McCain
placed his 20 cameras with jaguars pretty much in mind, and in his heart.
To McCain, the sight of tracks inspires awe, let alone -- and you’d better -- the sight of an actual jaguar.
“There’s a sense of not being the top dog anymore when you know there’s a
jaguar around,’ he said. “They're a very powerful animal and their presence
(even if unseen) is overwhelming.”
To support additional jaguar studies, George is establishing a fund through
the HSU Foundation. For details or to contribute, contact him at (707) 826-3430
or tlg2@humboldt.edu.
Contacts:
T. Luke George, chair, Department of Wildlife
Humboldt State University
Arcata, Calif. 95521
(707) 826-3430/tlg2@humboldt.edu
Emil McCain, wildlife graduate student
Humboldt State University
Arcata, Calif. 95521
ebm7@humboldt.edu
Humboldt State University media contact:
Sean Kearns
Public Affairs
Humboldt State University, Arcata, Calif. 95521
(707) 826-5151/news@humboldt.edu
Arizona Game and Fish Department media contact:
Debbie Freeman
Public Information Officer, (602) 789-3215
dfreeman@gf.state.az.us
http://www.azgfd.com/nrm
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